


to think that we could stay the same

by cipherwriter



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse (Supernatural), Angst, Episode: s05e04 The End, M/M, No Smut, Showering Castiel (Supernatural), Showering Dean Winchester, also an alternate universe of the endverse, it's endverse so it's kinda hurt/comfort but ultimately mostly hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:01:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29927598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cipherwriter/pseuds/cipherwriter
Summary: Based onthis post on tumblr: an alternate universe of the endverse where cas, instead of constantly hosting orgies and getting high, simply sits alone, killing and resurrecting a cockroach over and over.cas has all he needs; himself, his creation, and enough power to continue this cycle for a long time. he's fine. dean wants to take care of him anyway.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	to think that we could stay the same

**Author's Note:**

> title from two slow dancers by mitski, which i listened to a million times as i wrote this. i hope the characterization works well for what i've written, but if you want the normal endverse characterization, cas especially, you're not really going to get that here. hope you like it anyway!

cas sits on his knees but does not kneel as his eyes track the erratic running of his creation on the floor around him. the skittering little thing had not started as his creation, of course—had been one of his father’s, just like every other wretched thing around—but castiel believed that after so many changes, so many times he had taken it and broken it and restitched it from the inside out, each time forming a new exoskeleton new antennae new wings new miniscule brain and miniscule heart, that yes, he could call himself its creator. 

he named it adam, his first creation. he named it lilith, the end of things. he named it anna and balthazar and gabriel and uriel and raphael and lucifer and dean, all his family, at some time or another. he named it nothing, because to name was to define was to make understandable was to place it in a social context and he would not box it in like that.

when he is in a good mood, dean calls it twinkie, a bitterly ironic twist to his mouth when he says it.

“end of the world, the only things left are gonna be twinkies and cockroaches,” dean explained the first time. he paused, waiting for cas to respond, probably to ask for clarification, as he usually did when dean made some strange reference. but cas just stared at the cockroach, who was at the moment crawling across his palm and the back of his hand. eventually, dean sighed and left the empty cabin cas had taken as his own. cas only knew he’d left by the sound of his boots and the opening and closing of the door, the brief light making him wince.

still. cas allowed the name to stick, sometimes even in his head. he’s always trusted dean to give names.

his creation strays close to cas. he reaches out and traps it under one finger, watching as it tries to squirm away, little legs erratically reaching for purchase and the strength to push back against cas’s finger. its antennae wave in the air like two arms reaching for a knife in the dark, like darting eyes looking for a way out.

cas increases the pressure on its back and crushes it, its shell crunching and breaking. he gets its guts on his finger, and he raises them up to look closer. he is not learning anything new as he catalogues the death of each cell on his finger, as he listens for the minute sound of its heart beating and finding nothing, having done this routine so many times before. still, he chooses to observe again.

he sits in the silence for a moment. if he listens, he can hear the sounds of the others outside, the people and the world that still exists around him, but he doesn’t want to. they’re not important to him right now. they never are anymore.

he leans in close to his creation and picks it up, cupping it in both palms. it is dwarfed by his hands. it is so large, too large to be so small there in cas’s hands. this, his whole world, finally cast off his back and made small and light and controllable, fitting in his tiny vessel’s tiny fingers.

then again, he is his creation’s whole world, too, is he not? they are each the grandest thing in the other’s life, the only thing in the other’s life. cas’s power may have dwindled, but he hasn’t felt this powerful, this huge since he was god. since the last time he was god.

but then, looking down at its crushed little body, cas is filled with the sudden and overwhelming terror that this will be the time where his grace has entirely run out, and it will be dead forever and cas wil have nothing. his stomach drops, and all the power he felt a moment ago, the power he has been feeling since he intwined his life with this cockroach, drains out of him until he is nothing. his position suddenly does feel like kneeling, but he refuses to pray. he has not prayed in a long time, and he does not see himself doing so again.

he’s fine, he knows this logically. he can still feel the vestiges of his grace glowing dimly in him, he knows his current surge of fear is not true and he has enough to bring his creation back, but the fear is nauseating and makes his hands tremble, so he brings it back to life quickly.

in cas’s cupped hands, his creation reforms, guts flowing back into it from the floor and his finger and its back taking back up its perfect shape. its heart starts beating again. so does cas’s.

for a moment, it seems content to just sit in cas’s palms, warm and safe. even if cas chose to close his hands into fists, crush it into a mere pulp, it would be safe. cas would always, always bring it back, no matter what, even though for a moment he had feared he wouldn’t be able to. cas sags, just slightly, in his relief, and ever so delicately cups his creation to his chest in an embrace.

cas always preserves its memories when he brings it back. sometimes, it’ll resume what it had been doing before, as if nothing had happened. sometimes, it’ll rush around the room, frightened from the ordeal and being contained in this room with cas. sometimes, it’ll just sit still for a long while, so still that anyone else who couldn’t hear its heartbeat, who didn’t know it so well, would assume it had died. those times, cas knows it feels tired. powerless. unable to handle its life. it is still out of not knowing anything else to be.

it is understandable. cas gives his creation the best life he can, gives it the touch of grace and the personal favor of its god, like cas knows many humans strive for. but he knows his creation is not a human, and that living beings also want to have some purpose. he is not a wrathful or envious god like his father, so he understands why this life is not always enough for his creation. when cas sees that it has felt aimless for a long while, he will make it mazes from sticks and stones and hope that soon someone (dean) will bring around scraps of food he can give it. he wants it to be happy, to have purpose.

cas is supposed to eat too, now. supposed to eat and drink and maintain himself like a human. but he is not a human, yet. he is still an angel. to his creation, he is god. 

cas lowers his hands from his chest when he feels it begin to stir. it wants to wander and crawl, like it usually does. he lets it down to the floor and watches as its little antennae wave in the air, now exploratory rather than desperate, as it scurries around.

cas tries not to think of his moment of total, ice-cold terrifying powerlessness (and isn’t that so odd, too, that his physical body feels things like coldness because of an emotion). it was—odd. that’s all. it was a strange fluctuation. it meant nothing.

there is a short-lived moment of calm before the door opens, and the light of the outside sends his creation running to the corner. cas wishes he could tuck himself away in the corner with it, small and unseen. the light shows too much of him, his tattered trenchcoat and his unshaven face, removes the shadows he pathetically hides his wings in and shows them in all their sublime brokenness, his hundreds of transcendent, oil-slick dark and disgusting feathers littering the dusty floor. it is not a sight for mortal or holy eyes, the battered soul of an angel. it is not something cas himself wants to see.

then the door closes again, and he can almost pretend the moment of light and being witnessed never happened if he focuses entirely on the cockroach regaining the courage to leave its corner. he doesn’t look up to see who has entered. it is always dean. besides, it doesn’t matter to cas anyway, not when he has a purpose and a job and a creation to watch over. 

it will matter to cas once dean does something, though. 

when dean enters the cabin, there are several possibilities of what he might do. sometimes, he simply stands behind cas, or off to the side, or sits against the wall. cas does not know what he’s doing these times. he may be watching cas, or he may be thinking, or he may simply want somewhere dark and quiet to rest, as is difficult for the leader to find these days. other people don’t intrude here. cas is not a popular person, especially not these days.

sometimes, dean brings food. he just leaves it for cas, some of the time, but about an equal amount he’ll try to force cas to eat. cas knows he seems to eat dangerously little to dean, and maybe he does. cas wouldn’t know. he never had to eat before, but his sharp angles and the way a previously unnoticed fog seems to clear his mind every time he eats indicates he likely is, in fact, not having enough. these times, the moments when dean tries to get cas to eat, he seems sad. he tries to talk to cas, but cas rarely bothers to hear the words, only wants to listen to the soft patter of little feet on the floor.

sometimes, dean will be mad. he’ll rage and yell at cas, punch the walls and kill his creation, even. he tells cas to wake the fuck up and do something other than sit here torturing a fucking cockroach. if cas cared to correct him, he would tell dean he is not torturing the cockroach, he is blessing it with the the touch of the divine, but he doesn’t bother to explain it when he knows dean wouldn’t understand. (dean should. cas remembers how he used to lean into the touch of cas’s grace.) dean tells cas that he should just throw him out, that he’s weighing the whole camp down. cas would tell him that it doesn’t matter to him what dean does to him. none of this matters but him and his creation.

the worst things dean says when he’s mad like this (or what would be the worst if cas could care) is that it’s cas’s fault, along with all the other angels, for the shit they were in now and for taking his brother. cas would tell him that he tried his best, that even though he’d wanted the apocalypse to happen once, he’d long since changed his mind. that sam had still made a choice and dean had still made a choice and even though they never should have had to make those choices they still did. that he’d lost family, too, like lucifer and the angels. that he was losing his very essence along with all that.

but he doesn’t care enough to say any of that, and he’ll just bring twinkie back as many times as dean kills it.

this time, though, dean walks in and sits right next to cas. he moves slowly, lets his footsteps announce to cas exactly what he’s doing, as if cas is a frightened animal that may lash out and not an angel and a god. besides, the only one of them that’s lashed out any time lately is dean.

cas does not protest when dean sits, even though it means twinkie is less likely to come near again. that’s okay. he does not need it close at all times, he can be content to just watch it rove around. 

dean bumps his shoulder into cas’s. cas does not move.

but. for a moment. he glances to where dean sits.

cas doesn’t get into moods like dean and twinkie do. he is not particularly changeable from day to day anymore. he has all he needs, him and his creation in their endless cycle, contained in their cabin. with so little variation in his external life, it would make no sense for his internal life to change much either. 

yet, sometimes, very rarely, he. well. he feels. he feels, still, like a stain in himself that for all his efforts he can’t wash out, left from where dean winchester touched him.

already today he has felt, had his strange moment of gripping fear. and that, of course, didn’t mean anything because cas was fine and still had all the power he could feasibly need. until, of course, he runs out of grace. which he will, someday, down the line. even if it’s long down the line, going from a hypothetical eternity, the only death one in battle with your honor and power intact, to a guarantee of someday rotting away into nothing—it’s overwhelming. cas can’t face the feeling headon, like the sun. he’s avoiding eye contact with it.

but he’s still raw from it, the feeling he tried to brush off, still feels strange and boneless from it, in that way of a sudden rise and crash of adrenaline leaves a person. the first time he’d experienced that feeling, when his grace first began to run out, and he’d had to run for his life from some croats, he couldn’t withstand it, physically. had collapsed to the floor the moment he’d reached safety at bobby’s cabin, and dean thought something was terribly wrong with him.

something was, but not like dean had thought.

cas doesn’t want to think about it. he is trying so hard not to think about it, and he’s usually able to not think about it. but there’s the warmth of another body, of dean’s body, next to him, and cas can feel how cold he is and the way he shivers when there’s another body for him to compare himself to. he can feel how small and frail he is beside dean, strong and healthy and always human dean, rugged and scarred and capable dean, dean who by all rights should live longer than cas at this point but won’t because whatever grace he still has will be split between himself and his creation for years and years longer than this vessel should survive. just the two of them pushing their lifespans while all others cas has loved in his life will be dead or the reason the others are dead or both.

he pulls away from dean, as quickly as his weak, human body will let him. he wonders for a brief moment how claire and amelia novak are these days. dead, probably. and he’s still riding around in their loved one, letting the body of jimmy novak deteriorate in his control. 

cas was trying to not think about that kind of thing. right. he searches for his creation again, looks for its shining black back and listens for its little tapping feet, but there’s an odd rushing in his ears making it hard to hear anything else, and twinkie, his creation, could be dead, and his vision seems to be getting darker too, and oh no is he losing his grace even faster, has he lost his ability to see in the dark, has he lost his creation his whole world is he left only with his mortal self and his mortal loved ones (loved one) and nothing else, what will he do if he loses everything dear god dear father hated father-

cas comes dimly to the awareness of a hand on his shoulder and a voice, softly, saying his name, saying, “hey cas, buddy, calm down, it’s okay, you just gotta breathe, yeah cas that’s it you’re hearing me? okay buddy just try to match my breaths, here we go. in… out… in…” and cas is breathing again. he hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t. he is so tired of all his bits of humanity.

at some point, cas is breathing steadily again. he is able to hear fully once more, too, and as soon as he realizes this he focuses his hearing on finding twinkie, covering dean’s mouth to shut him up and eliminate sounds other than scuttering and the smallest heartbeat. 

after a moment, he is able to find the sound of its heart from where it roams around the edges of the cabin. for the second time that day, he slumps in relief. he is not sure why he is experiencing so many emotions today, but he would truly like to stop.

this time, when cas slumps, he’s caught, wrapped in strong, familiar arms. he doesn’t have the strength to fight it, to even pretend to himself he wants to fight it. he is so tired of all this. based on the subtle shake in dean’s shoulders (nothing compared the rapid tremors of cas’s body), dean is tired of all this as well.

“cas, man, talk to me. please. it’s been-” dean chokes back something, trying to swallow down the tears and emotion that are spilling out of him right now. he doesn’t let go of cas, but he does square up his shoulders, make himself melt into the hug a bit less. toughens up. always putting on a show. “it’s been a long time since you’ve talked to me.”

cas hardly knows how to talk anymore. he wants to slip back into concentrating on twinkie but he can hardly make out its heartbeat over dean’s, and can hardly even summon the energy to listen for it when he’s remembering what heat feels like held in dean’s arms after so long being cold and malnourished and alone (not alone how dare you think that you have all you need) on the ground.

dean sighs into him and grabs the back of his head, pulls him closer to his chest. “god, cas, you’re falling apart on me here.”

“i’m sorry,” cas says into dean’s chest. everything is soft and warm and fuzzy and his words probably slurred a bit. there is such a quietude to the two of them. cas is so used to feeling only power and greatness, heady and, frankly, probably a bit deranged, and now he feels—still. calm. 

small.

dean grips him tighter, leans his head down and presses a kiss into the crown of cas’s head. he is pulled so tight around cas, tension around cas’s laxness.

then, dean grabs cas by the shoulders and pushes him out so they can look at each other. dean’s eyes are red-rimmed, and he looks wretched. bags under his eyes, cheeks a bit hollower that they used to be. cas feels his eyes and his throat start to burn, and he once again curses whatever idiotic bodily function is causing such responses.

“cas.” dean chokes up again. he looks away. puts one hand to his eyes, then runs it back through his hair. lifts it in a loosely clenched fist, just hanging in the air for a bit. 

reaches, ever so slowly, letting cas (or himself) back out of the touch at any time, toward cas’s face. neither back out. he cups cas’s cheek.

cas can’t help but lean into it, just like dean always leaned into touch. he understands the appeal, now, in this moment. he wants to be wrapped in warmth and weight forever. he wants some way out of all this.

“cas,” dean whispers again, broken and soft and sweeter than anything he’s ever heard from dean. “let me- let me take care of you for a bit, cas.” 

cas’s eyes, for a moment, dart to where twinkie—his creation—is. he can’t possibly leave it here alone, no matter how odd he is feeling at the moment.

“hey, cas, no, look at me,” dean says, voice tinged with desperation as he places his cups cas’s other cheek as well, so he is cradling cas’s face entirely. cas drags his eyes back to dean’s, which are filling with tears again, for some reason. “please, just let me clean you up and feed you, you don’t gotta go anywhere, we’ll be right here, we’ll use the shower in here and we can eat on the floor for all i care, just let me help you.”

cas feels his heart rate increase slightly with panic, but he’s let himself get too invested in his old life again today already. he cares too much about dean right now to be able to hurt him. he’ll still be here, can check on twinkie anytime. it will be okay.

cas closes his eyes and nods. 

this time, when dean hugs him tight, he is not pulled into dean’s chest, but dean pulls into his own and pats his back, firm, but softer than he used to.

dean sniffs, then pushes himself up again and roughly scrubs at his eyes. “alright, let’s get you up,” he says, gruff but not harsh, and he pushes himself onto his feet. “i’m gonna need your help here for a bit, cas, or at least your cooperation, alright?” he says, then reaches out and pulls cas to stand by the arms.

cas stumbles, instantly, head spinning and legs like jello, but dean just holds him up against his body until cas can stand mostly still. dean still keeps a hand on cas, just in case. 

“alright,” dean says, “we’re gonna get you undressed so i can wash all this, alright?”

cas nods, shortly. he can’t make himself care enough about this part to do anything but. whatever makes dean happy and doesn’t mean him leaving this cabin, he’ll do. he goes through the motions of dean helping to take off his coat, tie, shoes, socks, shirt, pants, underwear. dean, too, seems to be just going through the motions, though he keeps up a running murmur of soft words. cas shivers even more than before, and he shuffles closer to dean, but he does not object. nor does he object when dean leads him through the door in the back left corner to the bathroom and seats him on the lid of the toilet seat, even though that is even colder against his skin than the open air. does not even object to the too bright yellow light dean turns on in the room.

“okay, cas, i’m- i’ll… i’m gonna be right back, okay?” dean says once cas is situated properly enough for his standards. “just don’t go anywhere or, uh, change your mind or anything. just-” he sighs. “yeah. just. be here.” 

then he pats cas’s shoulder and rushes out. cas simply sits on the lid of the toilet and listens to twinkie as it starts to roam around the whole cabin again, now feeling more comfortable with dean gone. his mind keeps trying to wander to other things, like dean and sam and his imminent full mortality and the horror of all their lives at the moment, but he does his best to wrangle it back in to the safety of him and his creation. listens to the heart that is beating only because of him, which he can stop and restart whenever he wants. he breathes evenly.

dean comes back. cas is not good with the passage of time, so he has no idea how long he was gone, only knows that he is now back, and that the creak of the door as he opens it and the sunlight he certainly allowed in with him drives twinkie into the corner again. and then he is coming into the bathroom with cas and he has two bags in his hand, presumably food and whatever he needs to clean cas up.

“hey, cas, buddy,” he says, soft, a grin spreading over his face and shoulders relaxing. he puts one bag somewhere on the ground outside the door of the bathroom, then comes in fully and puts the other bag on the ground. takes out bottles and a sponge and a razor, places them in the shower.

dean seems to be having difficulty looking directly at cas as he does this, his eyes landing on him every so often, then skittering away. if he really lets himself think about it for a moment, really tries to think like the old cas and what would have concerned him, he can understand why dean can’t look at him, with his wild grown out hair and beard and his thinness. he is sure he is oily and there are bags under his eyes, but he does not actually want to—nor does he have the energy to—check the mirror to find out. 

but then dean finishes setting up, and he turns and rubs his hands over his face, then turns back to cas. “okay, all set up. i-” he coughs a bit, turns his head, then looks at cas again. “i’m gonna come in and help. you can say no, but i think you could use all the help you can get.”

cas nods. he can’t imagine standing under the spray of the water, alone, cannot imagine why dean would suggest it when he keeps reaching out and touching cas. dean wants to be close to him right now, cas knows, but he won’t say it. cas, despite how he has tried, cannot help but feel the same. 

dean nods, once, looks off for a moment, rubs his chin, then nods again and starts getting undressed.

he piles his clothes in the corner, all tucked away, then turns back to the shower and starts up the water, waiting for it to turn warm. they are quiet, neither of them speaking a word. cas sees dean has more scars than he did when he raised him from perdition, restitched him together and categorized each one of his scars and blemishes, and he hurts.

finally, dean deems the water warm enough, and reaches to pull cas up again with a huffed out, “up you go.” together, cas with dean’s help, they step over the edge of the bathtub into the shower, and cas feels the heat of the water’s spray batter his back, painful but comforting, and dean’s hands, warm on his arms as they hold him, the heat of his chest that he’s pressed against.

“alright, cas, okay, i gotcha, i’m gonna get ya all cleaned up,” dean is saying, a lown mantra of soothing words as he lathers up the sponge with body wash and runs it first over cas’s back, then his arms, which he has to move out and up and around to get to. cas lets dean do this, lets himself feel small and human and cared for with him.

when cas first knew he was losing his grace, after he’d been unable to fly away from danger and had had to run, had felt muscles burn and adrenaline rush in and out of him, had felt lungs lacking air, he had laid on the ground, unresponsive, for long enough that his side bruised and he got sick from hunger. he hadn’t known what to do, as dean tried with increasing worry and desperation to get him to respond. he had felt human, and he knew it wasn’t going to get better. he didn’t know what to do with his body, his self that had felt like nothing it had before.

he had thought he knew what it was to feel powerless, when he’d been held at knife point, down on his knees, looking up at death. but he was wrong; he had felt cornered then.

he knew now what it was to feel powerless. and it would only get worse.

here, now, with this hot shower making him aware of how cold and aching he is, he feels powerless again. vulnerable. but dean—dean scrubbing his back and his neck, wrapping his arms all around him and reaching for every spot to clean, pulling cas’s back flush against his chest just to hold him up, pressing a gentle kiss into the joining of cas’s neck and shoulder—makes his vulnerability feel different. cas still feels vulnerable (though there is still enough power in him to stop dean, knock him out at the very least), but he does not feel in danger. he, for right now, cannot even dread the long down the line certain death that awaits him. he is safe with dean. 

and as dean reaches down, helps cas, who shakes as he stands and needs to lean against the wall to stay upright, to wash his feet, cas cannot help but to feel that dean still, in some way, believes in him.

dean stands. he squeezes out the sponge and gives cas the flash of a smile. “now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

cas shakes his head no, just looking up at dean. he is still bracing himself against the shower wall.

dean chuckles, small, almost a cough. he looks down, the smallest upturning of his lips, as he whispers, “yeah. not so bad.” he falls back against the wall behind him, so he and cas are both half upright on opposite sides of the shower, their legs between each other’s in the middle. dean’s eyes are red and his smile at cas is wobbly, until it’s not even a smile, until it’s him biting his lip and looking away again.

“i’m sorry, cas, i’m so fucking sorry.” 

“you are trying your best,” cas says, surprising himself that he answered. but he means it. with everything. dean tries so hard, all the time, and he always has.

“yeah, well, my best isn’t worth shit if it can’t help you- or- or sam, or really any single fucking person in the long run.” dean presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, curling in on himself. “fuck. sorry. just- just give me a second.”

he makes to get out of the shower, and cas can see him getting out and lashing out, breaking something in anger, coming back fuming with barely contained rage under his skin. cas doesn’t want him to leave. doesn’t want him to push out his sadness with anger and come back different. doesn’t want him to break this moment.

cas pushes off the shower and grabs dean’s forearm. “please. dean. don’t leave.” he feels the slight shaking thrum of energy, dean’s hands trembling just enough for cas to feel from the anger and sadness. 

dean brushes his face again, then covers cas’s hand with his own. “okay,” he says. “i’m here.”

he grabs another bottle like none of that happened, the only indication otherwise the intertwining of their two hands.

“alright,” dean says, brusque, “we’re gonna sit down for a bit and give you a break. just follow my lead.”

“always,” cas exhales. he does not want to examine if he means it. he knows, right now, in this strange day in their strange states, he would do anything dean asked him. but he does not know how long that will last.

so the two of them sit. cas is tucked between dean’s legs, back to chest again, his knees pulled up against his own chest, as dean lathers the shampoo into his hair. cas’s eyes are closed to keep it out of his eyes, and he just allows dean to do what he does.

by the time the shower floor has become uncomfortable below cas, dean is rinsing his hair. “all finished,” dean says, “though it probably wouldn’t kill you to cut this, too.”

“whatever you think is best,” cas says. he is being too revealing right now, he knows, but it is so hard not to when he is listening to his body for the first time in a long time, since he last acknowledged the passing of time. with it telling him “tired” and “hungry” and “cold” and “aching in a million places,” it is hard for himself to keep holding up his standards. his new self with his obsession with his creation and caring for nothing else. it takes a lot of energy to be so singularly devoted.

briefly, he listens again for twinkie, and hears it very close. likely examining the bag of food dean brought. it’s doing fine.

dean pulls cas’s shoulders back, gently, to rest against him. they sit like that, briefly, under the spray. but they can’t stay for long. they don’t have an infinite supply of hot water.

“you ready to stand up? i got one more thing to do.” dean murmurs into cas’s hair. cas nods the affirmative, and together, they begin the delicate process of getting up without slipping. 

once stood, dean finally grabs the razor and turns cas to face him. it’s a small, disposable, plastic thing, hard to do more damage with than a few knicks, but it doesn’t matter; here, now, cas would trust dean with an angel blade to his throat. dean won’t hurt him.

dean reaches out and holds cas’s head at the junction of his jaw. gently, touches lighter than his calloused and scarred hands indicate him even capable of, he reaches his thumb to cas’s chin and turns his head to the side. he runs the small blue razor down the side of cas’s face, slow, even rows from sideburns down the neck. cas glances over, straining his eyes to see without moving his face, and sees dean, tongue out in concentration, green eyes locked unwaveringly to the motion of the razor, like this is the most important, most delicate thing he has ever done.

he takes a long time, certainly longer than cas believes dean takes on his own face. cas does not mind, even though by the time they finish, the water has grown lukewarm and he is nearly fighting shivers. he got to be the subject of dean’s full attention, got to feel like something holy and precious by a being with consciousness again, and all for the simple virtue of being himself. he got to have dean’s hand on his face, gentle pressure pushing him here and there.

dean does this again as he finishes. he puts the hand holding the razor down at his side and tilts cas’s head this way and that to check his work. 

“there we are, cas. finally found you under that thing growing on your face,” he says, the first joke he’s made this whole time that has not sounded horribly sad. “left a little stubble, though, like you like it.” used to like it goes unsaid, hanging in the air like a ghost.

dean had finished. yet, still, his hand rests on cas’s face, like it was made to fit in the crook of cas’s jaw.

slowly, cas snakes his own hand up dean’s arm, to the brand he’d left on dean’s shoulder, the scar which was undeniably made from and for cas’s hand. he looks at the way they align perfectly, feels how strange and smooth the skin under his hand is compared to the rest.

dean’s thumb roves over to brush cas’s lower lip. cas looks up to find dean’s eyes on his own, intense. questioning. requesting.

cas cannot imagine saying no.

they both lean into the kiss haltingly. they have hurt one another so deeply lately. by all rights, either one of them should want to lean away before contact. cas certainly knows why dean would break this off and leave cas alone in the shower’s storm; he is angry at cas (not entirely unjustly) for the loss of his brother, and the apocalypse. not to mention, cas has retreated and cut dean off time after time lately, has abandoned dean to fight on his own while he plays god. he has not been a good guardian angel. a good friend.

but neither of them pulls away first, and they kiss under the cold spray of the water, lips and hands and pressed together chests keeping them warm. they pull out of the kiss after a few moments, but do not pull away from each other, keep foreheads joined and hands in the spots they belong.

dean gives cas an old blue grey shirt and green pants to wear until his old clothes are clean. the shirt is too big on cas, but that’s nothing new for him with the way the trenchcoat has always drowned him. 

dean helps cut cas’s hair back to around its old length and tells him about some of the truly disastrous haircuts he had given himself and sam while growing up. his eyes prick as he tells the stories and his voice tightens, but he never turns angry like he normally does when talking about sam these days.

he does choke up, though, when he says, “today’s sammy’s birthday.”

cas meets his eyes in the mirror and says, “i’m sorry.” there’s not much else for either of them to say about it.

as they eat, cas, with great difficulty, talks a bit about his creation.

“twinkie, you mean?” dean corrects with a little smirk as he breaks off a few crumbs of bread to throw to the roving little guy.

and cas’s feels a very small smile grow on his face, as he says, “yes, twinkie,” and continues on with describing how smart it is, how strong its spirit. 

once, even, as dean describes a recent fight with some croats, cas compares dean’s leadership to that of his older brother uriel in battle. dean freezes up at this, but doesn’t yell. both he and cas have brothers who have done terrible things. he can’t lash out at cas for missing the people he’d once loved, even if they’d hurt them both since then.

it’s not perfect. cas still has difficulty speaking much, or paying attention to dean for a long time. but after months of next to no interaction, this, conversation and contact and the kiss (the kiss which dean has been replaying over and over in his head, the one he’s been imagining since back before all this and things were still awful but not quite so), are monumental. there’s no happy ending anymore, of that dean’s pretty certain, but fuck, there might still be some more time for a happier middle.

not that dean’s an optimist or anything, but he might just have a little hope. just for this. just for cas, and maybe for cas and him, together as… something, again.

when dean enters the cabin the next day, cas’s old clothes in hand and ready for at least another meal together, cas does not look up from his spot on the floor. he watches twinkie skitter off into the corner and makes no other movement. in the light from the open door, dean can see the shadows of cas’s wings, still as broken and shedding as they’ve been for days, weeks, months. cas doesn’t say a word the whole time dean is there.

dean leaves cas’s clothes, folded in a pile, on the floor of the cabin. two days later, cas watches his creation crawl in and explore them, and thinks what a nice addition this is to its habitat.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find this fic [here](https://bloodfreakatstanforddotedu.tumblr.com/post/645124459673649153/to-think-that-we-could-stay-the-same) on tumblr!


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